Datacentre Deployment: New Racks (Part 1)

Deploying new server racks is a delicate process, and a lot can go wrong if it’s not done correctly. Each and every element needs to be thought out with precision, such as cable lengths, amount of power to each rack and even positioning of switches and management of cables.

We’re providing an inside-peek on the primary stage how we provision one of our Cloud Server racks.

This will only feature the preparation stage of the rack rather than fully stocked with servers. Essentially, you can guess where the servers will be going.

Below is stage one of the build where we introduce two side-of-rack (or zero-U) PDUs to provide power.
During this stage we also install switching equipment, cable management and multiple redundant uplinks to our network rack where we can provide multiple gigabits of internet connectivity and routing.

The switches we use comprise of enterprise Brocade networking kit with storage switches permitting a whopping 480Gbps of concurrent storage connectivity.

We opt for zero-U power distribution units (as shown to the left of the rack) as these don’t only save space but also makes management and maintenance of the servers much easier. After all, we don’t want to end up like this do we?

That’s it for stage 1. We will shortly be moving on to cabling the racks up in preparation for the servers to be delivered.